‘Citizen-historians will not only vote, but will also actively participate in civic life across the spectrum of possibilities.’
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

In divided cold war-era Germany, the last thing that an eminent historian of fascism would have hoped to do was scandalize. But scandalize Ernst Nolte did. The title of his essay The Past that Will Not Pass, published in the prominent Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1986, rehearsed William Faulkner’s famed dictum: “The past is never dead.” Under the unremarkable headline, however, lay a stark provocation.

The topic was Nolte’s specialty: the Nazi era. Germans had undoubtedly committed extraordinary atrocities, but how exceptional, he asked, were the crimes? And how exceptional did they render the country’s history? To make his point, Nolte suggested that Hitler’s annihilation policies were derivative, borrowed from the Bolsheviks, and reactive, triggered by the Nazis’ own anxieties about Bolshevism’s return.

Breaking open this Pandora’s box of historiographical taboos unleashed a very public reckoning with the origins and future of Germany’s violent past. The so-called historians’ controversy occupied headlines for more than a year and resurfaced several times thereafter. At root, the argument was about comparing two specific totalitarianisms. More broadly, it was a dispute about the salience of analogy, one that played out at a key moment in the nation’s history.

Nolte ultimately lost. The controversy that he ignited became a platform to negotiate a suitable public memory for a state about to reunify after 40 years of division. Most conceded that the dark chapter of German history could never be closed, but would live on in an ongoing confrontation – Vergangenheitsbewältigung(the struggle to overcome the negatives of the past) – cautioning against populism and advancing history as a check on politics. The model would extend to the communist past as well.

But Nolte also won. Without his bombast, reunification-era Germany might not have had a foundational, open, well-informed conversation about the place of history in contemporary society. If many now complain about fading historical awareness and unprocessed pasts – colonialism being one – it is because no new Nolte has risen to upset the status quo. Half-forgotten, he died in August 2016.

Ernst Nolte obituary

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Within months, in November 2016, Donald Trump’s shocking electoral victory sparked an outpouring of writing on the usefulness of historical analogies. Some were specific (to Weimar and Nazi Germany, Nixon-era US, South America), others general. They threw America into its own historians’ controversy.

Despite the representative museum assemblage on and off the National Mall in Washington, DC, the US lacks a shared public memory or narrative about the past. As in divided Germany of the mid-1980s, here lies a real opportunity for a broadened civic negotiation about what counts as US history, who gets to tell it, and what role it plays in bolstering democracy.

History is neither preordained truth, nor is it a prepackaged commodity. Its record must grow out of debate, not professional hierarchies or easy compromises. While the art of debate without acrimony seems out of reach in an age when opinion exchanges escalate to ad hominem attacks within seconds, controversy used to be the salt of social life during centuries past, restricted though it would have been by social class, gender, race, and religion. Newspapers specialized in polemics. Debating societies thrived. University students and professors were required to exchange positions in the format of disputatio. Why have we stopped now that the venues are open to all?

mary beard (@wmarybeard)

Prissy alert: History's for all not just 'historians'; but you have to KNOW something. Slurs like 'tosspot', 'left wing bigot' not useful.

Tools are the first problem. As historian Mary Beard notes: “History’s for all not just ‘historians’; but you have to KNOW something.” Arguing without knowledge – without evidence – takes a sledgehammer to the very foundations of what facts are. Fostering evidence-based and well-reasoned debate is an antidote against the alarming increase in constituencies who believe that interpretations of the past can exist outside either evidence or reason.

Crowdsourcing initiatives have tackled this issue head on. One example is the #NewFascismSyllabus, which corrals the flood of information and new research in the service of open learning across borders and disciplines. Standing on the shoulders of other seminal initiatives, among them the #CharlestonSyllabus and the #FergusonSyllabus, the #NewFascismSyllabus crowdsources news articles from across the web and curates them by theme.

Using social media to harvest ideas, the editors facilitate a lively exchange about authoritarianism in our time. Title aside, the purpose is to exploit the notion of analogy to fuel conversation. These seek to do what today’s embattled high school does not: provide a common yet critical language for debating about the present situation.

The second roadblock to reviving the culture of debate is lingering s​cepticism about social media, Twitter especially

Such projects challenge textbook and popular versions of US history that often dilute controversy for the sake of unity narratives. Their power lies both in their compilation – a democratic practice – and in the sharing of information, which break down the divide between ivory-tower academic disputes and rubber-meets-the-road activism. They aim to foster a sense of the past as eternally present, and in need of serious unpacking.

The US is in desperate need of more of this style of interaction, as communities and local governments reckon with acts of racist violence that hearken back to bygone eras. #CharlestonSyllabus makes clear that the US’s history of racist violence has never been far below the surface.

It carefully assembles readable historical materials, revealing the edifice upon which Dylann Roof built his plan to murder African-American congregants within their religious sanctuary. Roof, who made no effort to hide his white supremacist worldview, selected the church precisely because of its deep historical meaning to Charleston and African-Americans. In short, his violent assault on Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church has a history. Indeed, it is a strand of American history that everyone should know.

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For this reason, such programs depend on dynamic communities – college campuses, schools, civic organizations, activists, ordinary people. Their work is to be a springboard for collaborations between academics, college students, civic groups and school teachers. They counter fashionable but lazy complaints about young people’s historical ignorance by doing the obvious: teaching them that history is made every day, everywhere, by everyone.

Such visceral awareness can convince young people that they have futures as citizen-historians with parts to play in shoring up critical thinking in underfunded schools, on corporate campuses, and then at workplaces that tend to breed conformity. Citizen-historians will not only vote, but will also actively participate in civic life across the spectrum of possibilities.

The second roadblock to reviving the culture of debate is lingering scepticism about social media, Twitter especially. Progressives rage against this platform as a receptacle of puerile yet threatening outpourings, first and foremost by Trump himself. To many, it remains a billboard for racist, discriminatory or uninformed views. Yet just as much, Twitter provides opportunities to push back with evidence-based, clear arguments in the public eye.

This is what happened when the Harvard University historian and popular author Niall Ferguson tweeted that a new YouGov survey in the UK validates his favorable view of British colonialism. Hundreds of historians and ordinary British citizens objected to the idea that someone could “win” intricate historical debates by simple plebiscite. Many posted links to articles with proof from Britain’s former colonies. If anything, Ferguson’s comment brought the UK a step closer to confronting its imperial past during a particularly turbulent time for the country. The turbulent moments, now happening nearly every day, are the ones to seize.

Fake news is bad. But fake history is even worse | Natalie Nougayrède

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Disputes about the relevance of historical moments are not vapid 140-character one-offs, but they also needn’t be 140-page monographs on arcane topics. Crucially, the same platforms that birthed and nurtured Trump and his supporters have also generated new partnerships between diverse stakeholders, organized around the principles of shared authority, collaboration, and critical opposition. In the digital public sphere, consensus has gone the way of the dinosaur, and that is the way to go.

So has expertise, some would object. However, for the better part of the 20th century, expertise has often been questioned in advanced democracies, from the technocrats of the bureaucratic state to the civil service. More important are better, more informed, more frequent interventions and solidarities – in essence, more debate.

The US variant of the historian’s controversy and the widened public sphere that it brings about must recognize the productive potential of everyday history-makers. It must not just tap into it but fully harness it to seed a history that all Americans will want to fight over and for. The past is never dead, but wilful forgetting should be.

An original version of this article mistakenly referred to the #CharletonSyllabusProject. It is actually the #CharletonSyllabus. The article has been amended on 9 August 2017.

Jennifer Evans is professor of modern European history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada; Yuliya Komska is associate professor of German studies at Dartmouth College; and Michelle Moyd is associate professor of African history at Indiana University-Bloomington.